379 Pa. Super. 121 - Mitzelfelt v. Kamrin’s Empirical Analysis
1988
Citation profile
1 district · 19 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 20 later decisions — most recently January 2014
1 district · 19 state decisions
Later decisions citing this case, by decade. The current decade is in progress, and our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so the latest bars are undercounted — not a real decline.
Relationships
Relies on Hamil v. Bashline · Jones v. Montefiore Hospital · Smith v. Yohe · 337 Pa. Super. 58 - Ingrassia Const. Co., Inc. v. Walsh · Gradel v. Inouye
Most-quoted passages
The sentences later courts lift from this opinion, ranked by how many decisions quote each — the parts of the opinion doing the work. These counts are smaller than the citation total above because most of the 20 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“The general rule in this Commonwealth is that in order to establish a cause of action for medical malpractice, the plaintiff must present expert testimony establishing variance from accepted medical practice and that this deviation from community standards caused the plaintiff’s injuries____The only exception to the general requirement that expert testimony must be produced is “where the matter under investigation is so simple, and the lack of skill or want of care so obvious, as to be within the range of ordinary experience and comprehension of even nonprofessional persons.” ... As in other negligence cases, the plaintiff in a medical malpractice case bears the burden of proving a causal nexus between the wrongful conduct and the injury as part of the prima facie case. The plaintiff’s “burden of proof” on this issue encompasses two separate and distinct burdens____The first burden, the burden of production, refers to the responsibility of the plaintiff to present evidence of sufficient quality and weight that reasonably intelligent men could believe in the existence of the causal link sought to be established. If the plaintiff fails to satisfy this initial burden, it becomes incumbent upon the trial judge to remove the issue from consideration by the jury, since any decision reached by the jury based on consideration of this evidence would involve an inordinate amount of speculation and conjecture____If the plaintiff succeeds in presenting evidence of sufficient quality and ”
1 later decision quote this exact passage
How this case has been treated — in progress
Whether each later court followed, distinguished, criticized, or overruled this decision. The treatment classification (task #35) runs highest-cited cases first and lights up here as it reaches this one.